Books by Lee Meitzen Grue

Goodbye Silver, Silver Cloud  /  In the Sweet Balance of the Flesh   / French Quarter Poems  / Three Poets in New Orleans  / Downtown

CD Live! On Frenchmen Street

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Live! on Frenchmen Street

 CD by Lee Meitzen Grue

Musicians: Eluard Burt II: Flute, keyboard; Roger Poche: Bass

Lee Grue writes about New Orleans street life: Her poems and stories are the essence of live music.

She and flute player Eluard Burt first met and performed together at a place called The Quorum Club on Esplanade Avenue during the sixties. Over the years they lost contact. Recently, they met again and began performing together as The New Orleans Jazz and Poetry Ensemble.

The Second Line

What? Who? Is the second line. It's not the corpse in the casket. It's not the band of sweating musicians who follow the casket playing their souls out in the August heat. It is the people who follow the parade, dancing. We can't keep still, sometimes we arrive in church too early, one of us laying his hat on his stiff left arm begins to move up the aisle to the music, but someone comes and gently says: "Brother, the second line is forming outside."

These poems are second lines. They are about live performance. I was there when the musician felt a certain way and it came out of the horn. I was there when my own life could not be delivered by anything but music. A live performance is a one time thing thing. Special to everyone in the room. Sometimes it is not the best performance, but it is unique. Never will there be quite this mix of people, place, and music ever again.

In Louisiana babies don't always get left at home, we were taken along, and when the musician set ups set up the drums in the empty dance hall, I was there for the first beat: Ever after, I'm in the second line.

In 2000, Eluard A. Burt collaborated with Lee Meitzen Grue to produce Live! On Frenchmen Street

New Orleans music and street life as seen and lived by spoken word artist, with jazz background. Poet Lee Meitzen Grue and flute player Eluard Burt were part of The Quorum Club, the legendary coffee house on edge of the French Quarter during the sixties. They began doing jazz and poetry together at that time.

During the last few years they've resumed their collaboration with the help of Kichea Burt who engineered the sound on this CD.

They've performed at Cafe Brasil and other New Orleans clubs and in New York at The Knitting Factory.Grue, who also writes books, has appeared on the college circuit in the U.S. and internationally. She consider these poems "second lines": Homage to the musicians she follows.

There's an interview with Lee Grue in the (Winter 2001) issue of "Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Literature." Check it out. Photos, interview, and four pages of poetry. An overview of the jazz and poetry scene in New Orleans.

To Listen: http://cdbaby.com/cd/grue also http://hearingvoices.com/story.php?fID=153

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My own papers are at The Newcomb Center for Research on Women. Susan Tucker is the archivist there. She's a wonderful person. She would give you good advice. The other papers which have to do with New Laurel Review are at Xavier. Lester Sullivan would be the person to contact there. Good luck and a wonderful Christmas. Take pride in your work. It's important to many people. all best, Lee

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Downtown By Lee Meitzen Grue Lee Grue is arguably one of the finest practitioners of poetry in New Orleans' storied history. These superb writs are equal to the upwelling of jazz itself: from Tremé street corners, to the wayward French Quarter, to the carefree vibes of Bywater, all the way to back o' town; this astonishing collection speaks from a mythic pantheon off yowls & beats as timeless as the Crescent City herself. "If you're missing New Orleans, and you know what that means, you need to read Grue's book front to back, place by place, time by time, name by name, everything that breaks your broken heart and asks it to sing. A generous, loving tribute to poetry and to New Orleans"—Dara Wier  "Lee Grue's work is one of the majestic pylons that keeps New Orleans above water, a pylon woven thickly and subtly from the city's history. Her poetry weaves her personal history to the five centuries of the city's own, a fabric stronger than the dreams of engineers. Lee Grue holds us all on the warm open hand of her music; she emanates the love that raises the soul levees"—Andrei Codrescu\

Lee Meitzen Grue was born in Plaquemine, Louisiana, a small town upriver. New Orleans has been home for most of her life. She began reading her poetry at The Quorum Club during the early sixties. There she met musicians Eluard Burt and Maurice Martinez (bandleader Marty Most). Burt had just come back to New Orleans from San Francisco, where he had been influenced by the Beats. Eluard Burt and Lee Grue continued to work together over many years. Burt and his photographer wife, Kichea Burt, came home to New Orleans from California again in the nineties, where the three collaborated on a CD, Live! on Frenchmen Street. Eluard Burt passed in 2007.

Kichea Burt contributed some of the photographs in Grue's book DOWNTOWN. During the intervening years Grue reared children, directed The New Orleans Poetry Forum workshop, and NEA poetry readings in the Backyard Poetry Theater. In 1982 she began editing New Laurel Review, an independent international literary journal which is still published today. She has lived downtown in the Bywater for thirty-five years. After the flood of 2005 she began teaching fiction and poetry at the Alvar Library, which is three blocks from her house. Her other books are: Trains and Other Intrusions, French Quarter Poems,  In the Sweet Balance of the Flesh, and Goodbye Silver, Silver Cloud, short fiction.

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The White Masters of the World

From The World and Africa, 1965

By W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)

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Ancient African Nations

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Negro Digest / Black World

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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan  /  The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll  /  Only a Pawn in Their Game

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery

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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg

The Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804  / January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of Haiti 

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update 8 July 2008